Minimalist nativity set
Halloween is so two days from now. Which might as well be last week in the blogosphere. I’m moving on to Xmas. From Berlin artist Oliver Fabel.
Makers
Toolbox: Maker sartorial, part 1
In the Make: Online Toolbox, we focus mainly on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your […]
Fake TV camera trend takes over elementary school
This fascinating piece, from This American Life (animated by Chris Ware), tells the story of an elementary school where a couple of kids made a TV camera out of cardboard and tempera paint. Soon, the cardboard camera craze went viral and it seemed like every kid was either a camera operator, an anchor, or some […]
The gravity-powered xylophones of Charles and Ray Eames
901 documents the dismantling of the offices of famous U.S. designers Charles and Ray Eames following Ray’s death in 19XX. The Eames office was a kind of maker fantasy-land, with finished and unfinished projects scattered about, meticulously organized tools and supplies, and wonderful little gewgaws in every nook and cranny.
The first few minutes of the film feature a delightful bubbling xylophone soundtrack that is eventually revealed to be coming from these prototype toys designed by the Eameses themselves, and installed in their office for their own amusement.
The towers are wooden boxes six inches square and about 15′ tall, fronted with acrylic, and having sides slotted to accept metal xylophone keys which fit loosely enough to allow free vibration and easy rearrangement. The slots for the keys are angled toward one another, slightly, so that the surfaces of the keys present a series of alternately-sloped platforms for a small hard plastic ball which, when dropped from the top of the tower, will plunk its way slowly down to the bottom, playing a little tune as it goes. The balls are injected using a manual pneumatic piston which shoots them up a pipe to the top of the tower.
Giant cobweb made of coffee stirrers
I’m going to invent a time machine so I can go back and persuade my parents to name me Jonathan Brilliant, which for now am what made this impressive installation simply called “The Berlin Piece.”
William Kamkwamba at MIT
William has been a classic maker since he was very young. One of the most powerful stories they told was about how William learned science. The Malawian famine in the early 2000’s resulted from poor rains causing a crop failure. To conserve their resources, William’s family could not afford the tuition for him to got to secondary school. William did, however have access to a library funded with donated books located at his former primary school. He had been exploring and repairing radios for several years, and in the books in the library, he found useful resources for learning physics, electricity generation and magnetism. Though the books were written in English, rather than his native Chichewa, he would find a picture in the book that showed a diagram of a system that interested him. He would then note the figure number below the illustration and go hunting through the text looking for the passage that referred to the image. Once he found it, he would translate that section of text with the help of the other books on hand and the librarian. Through this process, William taught himself physics so that he could build himself a windmill to power the lights in his family’s house.
Help publish a book on living well for less
“Spike” is a cartoonist (caution: “F-word” on the link) who says she’s mastered the art of living well on an artist’s income and wants to share what she’s learned by writing a book, called Poorcraft: A Comic Book Guide to Frugal Urban and Suburban Living. She’s using an innovative website, called Kickstarter, to try and […]
